What Is Bounce Rate and What are The Ways To Improve It?

Bounce rate can be understood by the percentage of the visitors coming to your website and leave it without going any other page on the site. This percent can be seen in Google Analytics. If your website is entertaining the bounce rate of 80%, then it means that 80% of your visitors leave your site just after watching the page they entered on. This page could be the home page or any other internal one.

The bounce rate indicates the percentage of the people who are not finding your website interesting enough or the website is not retaining its visitors. There could be one more reason of bouncing people: either they found exactly what they needed or they realize that the site is not the place where they can find what they are actually looking for. The efforts are needed to make sure that once a visitor arrives at any page of your website, he or she get automatically encouraged to visit more pages of the site.

Is the higher bounce rating really an alarm?

Before determining the status of the bounce rate and its impact on the website, it is essential to understand the goal or the objective of your website. There are many sites whose prime objective is not to influence the visitors to explore the entire content on the website. Instead of it, they aim to take a call to action.

Following are the examples of a call to action that can lead your visitor off the site:

If the website is concerned with an inquiry about products or services like 1800 number.

If your website is aimed to lead the customers to another domain or network to purchase online products.

If your site is a pay per click, link or diverts visitors to the affiliate marketing sites.

If your website is one of the above kinds and your aim is not having the visitors looking for more content on your website, you really need not worry about a remarkably higher bounce rate.

The sticky content

With the use of the latest version of Google Analytics, you can easily get an idea of most page views in the period of last one month with their particular bounce rate. This information helps the website owner in determining about:

The content that leads the visitors to see the more products on the website.

The page on your website requiring the improvement, so that it could be able to send visitors to the other pages of the site.

Best traffic sources

The next thing that you should figure out is the traffic sources that have brought the most of the visitors to your website and their respective bounce rate. With this information, you can figure out that which is the most effective and efficient traffic source that brings the good amount of visitors that stuck for a longer time to your site. Now, you can focus on the traffic sources that are diverting a good amount of serious visitors to your website.

Best keywords

You cannot deny the important role of keywords in the strategy of bringing the high volume of the visitors to the website through the genuine searches and their respective bounce rate. In this way, you find the target set of keywords which need more optimization in order to generate more serious traffic with a low bounce rate.

Along with the above data set, Google Analytics offers many other things that are very useful in the relation of bounce rate of a website. These can include the various demographics such as a type of browser, location, social media engagement, etc.

How To Improve Bounce Rate?

Now, when we better understand the term bounce rate and the various factors affecting it (such as content, keywords, traffic source and demographic data), it is the right time to discuss the ideas or methods of improving the bounce rate.

4 Ways or Methods To Improve Bounce Rate

The best way is to add the links to a good amount of pages within the content of the website. Create the links to the pages, having a good potential to be liked by the visitors. It can be done by placing links within the content or in the manner of “liked it, sure you’ll love this also” at the bottom of the content.

There are many visitors who are not interested in buying the products but want to gather more information about it. So if there are some more interesting and educating links presented on the page such as product manuals and guidelines for using the product effectively, product reviews and many other concerning ideas, it is easy to encourage the visitors to stay longer on the site and look for more pages and content on it.

An attractive sidebar easily influences the visitors to look for more content at the site. It is a rather smarter idea to include an attractive and a link enriched sidebar throughout the website.if you want to introduce your visitors to you, create an “About Us” link in the sidebar. The other interesting and informative ideas are “first time guide”, “our other popular products”, “top content”. Through these links, the visitors are invited to get deeper into the website.

If Google Analytics is indicating that any of your contents is facing the high bounce rate and a rather low time spent on the website by the visitors, the most probable reason for this could be the incapable or a weak content that providing the visitors what they actually want. In this situation, you are recommended to review the pages with higher bounce rate and low time paid by the visitors. Make them more attractive, more informative and relevant so that the visitors may not leave the page immediately after reaching it. With a powerful page, you can also influence the visitors to look for more information and visit other pages on the site.

Conclusion:

Along with the above methods to improve bounce rate, you need to ensure that the visitors may revisit your website next time. For this purpose, you should provide a good amount of easily accessible links throughout your website, social media profile, emails, newsletters and any other online methods.

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About The Author

Arpit Singh is a Digital Marketing consultant and a Passionate Blogger from Noida, India. He is also an Author and Trainer in the field of Digital Marketing. He blogs about digital marketing tips and tricks at his blog digitalseoguide.com. Learn more about him at About page.